Saturday, May 30, 2015

The attacker, a “self-appointed watchwoman” named Nancy Kay Knoble,
began pounding on the car’s windows and doors, and commanding
the Abumayalehs to get out of the vehicle. And that’s when Knoble took
out her pellet gun. The couple she was threatening, however, didn’t know
the firearm wasn’t a more powerful model.

“She pulled the rifle and said open the window or I’ll shoot you guys,” Adly Abumayaleh tells local news station KARE.
Fearful, the Abumayalehs complied. The couple exited the vehicle and,
while Knoble held her gun to Adly’s back, the trio approached the house
where the Abumayalehs’ son was spending time with friends.

As promised, the Abumayalehs’ child was where they said he would be
and Knoble, satisfied that the family was not a threat severe enough to
keep holding at gunpoint, “backed off,” according to KARE.

But the Abumayaleh family was shaken. “I thought, I am going to die this night,” Majida says tearfully.

Police arrested Knoble at her home nearby and recovered the crime scene pellet gun.

Jennifer Carlson says the increasing prevalence of men carrying guns in
public in some areas is the result of a "crisis of confidence in the
American dream." She writes that "men find in guns a sense of duty,
relevance and even dignity." ("Why men feel the need to carry guns," op-ed, May 26)I am a man. I have been disappointed in my pursuit of the ever-more
elusive American dream. I feel at times irrelevant and lacking in
purpose. However, I do not carry a gun. Does that make me less of a man
or defeatist?

While teaching at a private school in Arizona, I
confronted an individual who was openly carrying. I asked him why, and
he answered, "Because I can." There was nothing about duty, only
disrespect for the decency of most Americans who feel unsafe in the
presence of an armed individual.

This isn't because of protection or duty, but unmitigated arrogance and a distorted interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.

Open carry activist calls for arrest of lawmakers following vote

Heroic citizens stopping someone from killing a large number of people don’t seem to be considered news worthy.

Don’t people want to read about a brave soul risking his life by
running towards the sound of gunfire while others run away? Yet, such
stories never get national news coverage by the national mainstream
media.

While accidental gunshots get national coverage, few people have any
idea how often concealed handgun permit holders stopping mass killings.

The lack of news coverage allows left wing media outlets, such as Mother Jones which should know better, to falsely claim: “In not a single case was [a mass public shooting] stopped by a civilian using a gun.”

The truth is that the more successful these heroes are in preventing
people from getting killed, the less media coverage they receive, but
the lack of fatalities doesn’t explain the lack of news coverage. And
if the heroes hadn’t been there, the attacks would have been successful
and the national mainstream media would have been talking about the
attack for days.

It's thoroughly dishonest, as we've come to expect, for John Lott to pretend the lack of coverage of stopped mass killings is because of media bias. It's simply and obviously because there's no proof that something which hasn't happened yet, would have happened.

Having said that, it's also unfair for Mother Jones to imply that no mass shooting has ever been thwarted.

It seems to me that the handful of anecdotal cases cited in the article are just that, a handful of anecdotal cases. The numbers would not add up to much - but of course, no one knows.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

A 2-year-old boy has died from injuries sustained when he
accidentally shot himself at a home in Lunenburg Monday morning,
according to the sheriff's office.

The boy was shot just before
9:30 a.m. at a somewhat secluded home along Doswell Town Road in
Meherrin. His family was visiting from out of town for the Memorial Day
holiday when he was left alone in a bedroom. Sheriffs say he reached up,
grabbed a loaded handgun off a dresser and pulled the trigger, shooting himself.

He
was flown to VCU Medical Center in Richmond in critical condition, but
died on Wednesday morning. Officials say the family is cooperating with
police and officials haven't said whether any charges will be filed.

Yesterday, I visited a local gun retailer and purchased several
30-round MagPul AR magazines that were on unrestricted display on store
shelves. I asked the clerk about the “law,” and he indicated that it was universally, contemptuously ignored and that nobody cared.

When the law was first signed, retailers simply sold normal-capacity
magazines dissembled. The purchaser subsequently put the parts back
together and went his merry way.

Today, even that cynical pretense has apparently been discarded!

The problem with stupid, intelligence-insulting “laws,”
passed by sleazy politicians who never even read them, is that the
universal contempt they invariably generate eventually casts a pall of
disrespect over the entire body of law!

When one law is disrespected (and should be), and is thus ignored (and should be) and thus largely unenforced (and should be),
because even the authorities generally recognize it is stupid and
unbeneficial to anyone, the societal glue that holds together our entire
Civilization weakens.

When we can’t respect certain laws, we certainly can’t have any
respect for politicians who passed them. Likewise, we can’t respect the
electorate who put those politicians into office. Suddenly, our entire
Civilization no longer deserves our respect!

Excuse me, but aren't those good reasons to obey laws, even those you don't like? Wouldn't truly patriotic citizens want to sacrifice in order to protect "the societal glue that holds together our entire
Civilization?"

Right on cue, the National Rifle Association has unveiled its 2016
presidential election conspiracy theory with the baseless claim that
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is harboring a secret
plan to confiscate Americans' firearms. But Clinton has never endorsed
such a plan and in fact has defended private citizens' right to own
guns.

In a May 11 article published in the NRA's magazine and on its lobbying website,
the gun group wrote, "Whether or not she understands the Second
Amendment, Hillary Clinton disdains and distrusts that freedom," and
claimed Clinton "wants control over every aspect of your right to keep
and bear arms -- so she can deny it at will."

Clinton's own recent statements
about "the right of people to own guns" meant the NRA was forced to
juxtapose a series of old Clinton quotes -- some dating back to the late
1990s -- and hope that its readers would make implausible leaps of
logic to buy into the conspiracy theory that a President Hillary Clinton
would confiscate firearms. The NRA ran a similar fearmongering campaign
about President Obama during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections that also had zero basis in fact.

5 The gun has been behind some of the great advances in medical history

As guns have evolved through the centuries, so too have medical
responses to the injuries sustained from them. In the 14th century,
gunpowder’s harm caused doctors to believe bullets were contaminants.
This led to the practice of burning the wound to rid the body of poison.
By the American war of independence (1775-83) surgeons were suggesting
that, if a gunshot wound was to be sewn up, a piece of onion was best
put inside, and the wound reopened after one or two days.

By the Crimean war of the 1850s, though, Florence Nightingale’s
efforts to clean hospitals had a notable impact on patient mortality,
which dropped from 52% to 20%. Joseph Lister’s experiments applying
carbolic acid to wounds also helped reduce death rates. And Roentgen’s
development of the X-ray in 1895 helped pinpoint fabric, bullets and
bone fragments. The impact of these discoveries was revolutionary:
research into the Spanish-American war in 1898 suggests that 85% of US
casualties survived.

The National Rifle
Association is once again trying to boost the sale of firearms at the
expense of our well-being by asking Congress to pass the Constitutional
Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.If passed, this law
would allow those with concealed carry permits to take their firearms
across all state lines. The states that boast the weakest concealed
carry laws would trump states that have passed stricter laws. (So much
for states’ rights.) More concealed carry permits lead to the sale of
more handguns. While that may be good for the gun industry, it has a
demonstrable negative impact on the safety of our communities.

Here is why: Our laws in New
Mexico work. According to the Violence Policy Center their research
shows that from 2007 to the present New Mexico has not had one incident
of a concealed carry killer. That means there have been zero incidents
with a law enforcement officer killed by a concealed carry permit
holder, a private citizen, a mass shooting or a murder suicide. Only 12
other states can boast such good statistics. The reason we have such a
good track record is because our strict laws on these permit holders are
working. In fact, when the NRA lobby tried to weaken our New Mexico
laws this last legislative session with five separate bills, our state
legislators boldly voted against every one of them.

The numbers from the New Mexico
Department of Health confirm a 42 percent rise in concealed carry
permits in our state (from 12,000 in June of 2012 to 40,000 in 2014). As
of today, at least 10 states issue a permit without first requiring
some kind of firearms safety training. At least 10 states issue a permit
to people convicted of violent misdemeanors and 19 states will allow
people with a demonstrated history of drug or alcohol abuse to carry
concealed firearms.

If Congress passes this law, the
1,400 felons to whom Florida issued permits since 2007 and/or the 2,400
felons to whom North Carolina issued permits from 2007 to 2011 would now
be welcome to carry firearms in our state.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

As deaths from gunshot wounds rose steadily in Georgia and most other
states, the District of Columbia crafted a narrative-busting success
story. Once one of the nation’s most violent jurisdictions, the District
reduced firearms deaths by more than half, even as its strict
gun-control laws came under attack in Congress and the courts.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of government statistics,
insurance industry data and reports from state vital-records agencies
found that Washington cut gun deaths by 58 percent over the past decade.

Besides D.C., only four states reported fewer gun deaths in 2013 than
in 2003, the Journal-Constitution found: New York (down 17 percent),
California (down 13 percent), Maryland (down 11 percent) and Illinois
(down 3 percent). In New Mexico, the same number of people died from
gunshot wounds in 2013 as in 2003.

Nationwide, gun deaths rose by 12 percent; in Georgia, the increase
was 8 percent. Maine had the highest rate of increase: 93 percent. In
all, nine states recorded increases in gun deaths of at least 25
percent. Those include Utah (up 47 percent) and Oklahoma (up 41
percent).

Spend much time reading conversations about guns on the Internet, and you’ll come across a list of rules for a gunfight.
This is often tongue-in-cheek, though there’s a large measure of good
advice contained therein. But we need to add a Rule Zero: If you know
in advance that a gunfight will occur, don’t attend.

Think about that for a minute. One of the extant rules is that the
sooner you finish a gunfight, the less shot you’ll get. Doesn’t that
suggest that if you don’t get involved in the first place, you have a
good chance of not getting shot at all? Now this is not to say that
we’re obliged to attempt to outrun a bullet. Stand Your Ground laws
address what happens when the gunfight comes to you. But the answer to
the question asked by gun control proponents is that private citizens
aren’t police. It’s not our job to go somewhere that crime is expected
to occur. We own and carry firearms to protect ourselves and our
families, not to act like some comic book character, seeking out trouble
in the dark corners of the big city.

Why weren’t we there? We weren’t there precisely because we aren’t
the people gun control advocates accuse us of being. We aren’t looking
for trouble. We aren’t spoiling for a fight. We’re just living our
lives and working to improve the odds if a fight is imposed on us.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

For the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the
N-word. People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches
for "migraine(s)," "economist," "sweater," "Daily Show," and
"Lakers." (The authors attempted to control for variants of the N-word
not necessarily intended as pejoratives, excluding the "a" version of
the word that analysis revealed was often used "in different contexts
compared to searches of the term ending in '-er'.")
It's
also important to note that not all people searching for the N-word are
motivated by racism, and that not all racists search for that word,
either. But aggregated over several years and several million searches,
the data give a pretty good approximation of where a particular type of
racist attitude is the strongest.Interestingly,
on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches
happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the
Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up to New York and
southern Vermont.
Other
hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast,
Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio. But
the searches get rarer the further West you go. West of Texas, no region
falls into the "much more than average" category. This map follows the
general contours of a map of racist Tweets made by researchers at Humboldt State University.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt at least a partial blow to police reform advocates Monday, in a ruling
that held police officers could not be sued after all for firing
gunshots at a severely mentally disabled woman who threatened violence.

The decision is a loss for plaintiff Teresa Sheehan, who survived the
deadly police force, and had won the right to sue in the lower courts. Studies in several cities
have found that about half of police shooting victims are mentally ill,
and that the mentally ill are disproportionate victims of excessive
police force. Sheehan, like many of disabled police shooting victims, was shot in what started as a call to police for help.

But Monday’s Supreme Court ruling also avoided what could have been a much worse outcome for disability advocates. The justices punted
on what was perhaps the most significant question before the U.S.
Supreme Court — how federal disabilities protections under the Americans
with Disabilities Act applies to this sort of police conduct. Had the
justices ruled on that question, advocates warned,
the conservative Roberts Court could have made disabilities protections
substantially weaker than they are now. “While San Francisco may intend
to craft arguments that it believes will limit the damage to
individuals’ rights under the ADA, it will have little control over what
the Supreme Court does,” disability groups wrote in a letter to San
Francisco, urging the city to drop its appeal.

San Francisco didn’t drop its appeal, but the justices heeded its
call for a limited ruling, and didn’t rule at all on the question of
whether those with disabilities should be treated differently by the
police.

Instead, the justices’ ruling made clearer than ever that under
current law, police officers could not have been expected to consider
Sheehan’s mental illness when they entered her room at a group home
twice, and responded to her violent threats by shooting her six times.
“The Fourth Amendment standard is reasonableness, and it is reasonable
for police to move quickly if delay ‘would gravely endanger their lives
or the lives of others.’,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the
six-justice majority, noting that they could not weigh in on the
relevance of Sheehan’s disability.

One of the youngest victims was Jacele Johnson, a four-year-old girl,
who was shot while sitting in a car parked outside of a prom
celebration in West Englewood as someone drove by firing. Two other
children were also shot in the same incident: a 17-year-old boy who was
hit in the chest and had a graze wound to the neck, and a 15-year-old
girl who suffered a graze wound on her forehead, both of whom were in
stable condition. Jacele was taken to a hospital and underwent surgery,
and she was upgraded to serious condition Sunday morning.

The first fatality was a 34-year-old man
who was shot in the chest and shoulder while sitting on the front porch
of his home in Wicker Park. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. The
youngest death was a 15-year-old boy in Bronzeville who was shot along
with another 14-year-old struck in the foot in an alley. Other
fatalities included
a 20-year-old man with multiple gunshot wounds; a 24-year-old man shot
in the head; a man between 20 and 30 shot in the face; a 29-year-old
woman shot in the chest and leg by a group who were denied entry to a
house party; a 35-year-old man shot in the stomach; and a 28-year-old
man shot in the head and shoulder.

Critics of gun law reforms argue that the high levels of gun violence in
Chicago are proof that regulation doesn’t work, given that the city has
relatively strict gun laws. But lax laws surrounding the area, both in
the state of Illinois and nearby states, allow guns to flow into the
city, which make up the vast majority of those seized by law enforcement. Research has found
that localities in states that have weak gun laws tend to suffer higher
rates of gun violence than those in states with stricter ones. Overall,
more gun ownership has been found to lead to more murders.

AmmolandIn a previous essay, I mentioned that we do not know what proportion
of unsolved homicides are justified homicides. The reason is that most
homicides are violent criminals killing other violent criminals, and
that because a person is a criminal, they are reluctant to report a self
defense shooting to police. From the previous essay:

In the United States, about 37.5% of the homicides are unsolved. In Chicago in 2013, the number was 75% unsolved.
Most homicides involve criminals killing other criminals. How many of
those would be justifiable if solved is unknowable; but clearly some
are. It is not hard to believe that someone with a criminal record
would just walk away from a justifiable killing, if he feared
prosecution for gun possession, or simply did not trust the police.
Those are unknown percentages, but if the number is close to the
percentages in solved homicides, then Klecks estimate of justifiable
homicides increases by 60%. Instead of 3-7 times the FBI numbers, we
get 5 – 11 times the the FBI reported figures, for 2012 clearance rates.

There were 310 justifiable homicides recorded by the FBI UCR in
2012. So the actual number of justified homicides is likely between
1,500 and 3,000. As many as 40% of those are unsolved homicides.

The
bill, which has already passed the Senate, goes to Gov. Brian
Sandoval’s desk. The governor’s office didn’t indicate if he will sign
the bill.

SB175 would expand the definition of justifiable
homicide to include killing someone in defense of an occupied motor
vehicle or someone who intends to enter a vehicle to assault a person
inside. The bill also would grant civil liability protection to those
who use justifiable force.

It would end a handgun registration
requirement in Clark County and establish “state control over the
regulation of policies concerning firearms.”

Under the bill,
anyone convicted of domestic violence, including a misdemeanor offense,
could not own a firearm. Doing so would be a felony.

SB175 would
also expand the current law recognizing other states that offer
concealed carry permits and allowing residents of those states to carry
weapons in Nevada. States that require a class, program or training to
obtain a permit would be granted reciprocity, expanding the number of
such states by about 10.

Assemblywoman Dina Neal, D-North Las
Vegas, opposed the measure, saying it’s too subjective and tips the
scales in favor of shooters who claim they were afraid.

“How do you determine fear?” Neal said.

In
another development, the Assembly introduced a new “campus carry” bill
on Friday that would allow permit-holders to carry a concealed weapon on
college campuses. Assembly Bill 487 was referred to the Assembly
Judiciary Committee.

Just a day earlier, legislators in the
Assembly rejected an amendment to SB175 that would have allowed campus
carry. The Assembly voted 24-18 Thursday to kill the controversial
proposal, with eight Republicans helping defeat it.

Most of the eight Republicans who voted against campus carry Thursday had a change of heart Friday.

Monday, May 25, 2015

This question has found itself on the national stage and will likely be an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election.

Last year, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul called for the restoration of
voting rights for some non-violent felons. This idea has caught on with
both parties. However, voting rights legislation will never succeed
without some of these folks getting back their right to own guns as
well.

The right to own a firearm is not like the privilege to possess a
driver’s license. It is, like the right to vote, a fundamental civil
right.

People convicted of non-violent felonies should not have a
Constitutional right removed just because of the stigma associated with a
felony conviction.

There are thousands of examples of people who have been convicted of
forgery, theft, and many other non-violent offenses. The vast majority
of those cases did not even involve a gun.

While these are criminal acts and should not be tolerated, the
offender does not put our community at risk by keeping a handgun at home
for personal protection.

A white Cleveland patrolman who fired down through the windshield of a
suspect’s car at the end of a 137-shot barrage that left the two unarmed
black occupants dead was acquitted Saturday of criminal charges by a
judge who said he could not determine the officer alone fired the fatal
shots.

Brelo could have been convicted of lesser charges, but O’Donnell
determined his actions were justified following the chase, which
included reports of shots fired from Russell’s car, because officers
perceived a threat.

Thirteen officers fired at the car with Russell and Malissa Williams
inside after a 22-mile high-speed chase that involved 62 marked and
unmarked cars and reached 100 mph. Brelo was the only officer charged
because prosecutors said he waited until the pair was no longer a threat
to fire his final 15 rounds.

Russell, 43, and Williams, 30, were each shot more than 20 times.
Prosecutors argued they were alive until Brelo’s final salvo but medical
examiners for both sides testified they could not determine the order
in which the deadly shots were fired.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

The Alabama Senate passed
a new firearms Bill that would allow any gun owner to carry and
transport a loaded handgun in their vehicle without the requirement of a
concealed carry permit. Senator Gerald Allen, a Republican from
Cottondale, stated that his Bill strengthens the Second Amendment rights
of Alabama residents by mirroring the bordering States; none of which
require a concealed carry permit for transportation of a handgun within a
vehicle.

The Senator references the Castle Doctrine, which states a person’s
vehicle is an extension of their home, and therefore should be allowed
to carry a handgun in their car without the need of a permit; given a
permit is not required for anyone to keep a handgun in their home.

Gerald Allen goes on to state that a person should not be required to
purchase a permit and ask for permission to carry a handgun in a
vehicle for the purpose of self-defense. He mentions the fact that a
single mom who works in a dangerous part of town may wish to carry a
firearm for self-defense; but should not be expected to spend the extra
money for a permit to exercise her constitutional right.